The following discussion of the background to the invention is intended to facilitate an understanding of the present invention only. It should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgement or admission that any of the material referred to was published, known or part of the common general knowledge of the person skilled in the art in any jurisdiction as at the priority date of the invention.
Interactive TV broadcast game using a plain old telephone (POT) typically requires the POT to be a game controller and a game server or host to process the Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency signaling (DTMF) tones or voice received over the POT handset to facilitate the game play. The game server may also include an Interactive Voice Response Service (IVRS) to process the DTMF tones or voice.
An example of an Interactive TV broadcast game in the 1970s using POTs is the game known as ‘TV Pow!’. ‘TV Pow!’ allows a call-in player to yell ‘POW!’ every time a target, for example, a spaceship moved within a crosshair in the middle of the TV screen. In the context of ‘TV Pow!’, the game server is a processor configured to receive output voice and process whether a spaceship looking object is within the crosshair (i.e. target).
A main disadvantage of the TV broadcast game such as the TV Pow! game is the fact that it may not be suitable in a multiplayer context due to delays or latencies associated with different POT system, which inevitably makes it increasingly biased against players with higher latencies or delays. This latency shall be referred to as phone latency. In addition, broadcast television signals are received and displayed on different television, sets at different times (which may range from one to thousands of milliseconds apart) due to various latency factors such as mode of transmission, number of hops, attenuation etc. This second form of latency or delay shall be referred to as display latency. As illustrated in FIG. 1 and FIG. 2, broadcast of TV may be transmitted directly from a terrestrial transmitter to a TV set, via satellite transmitter-receiver or a combination of both, each of which causes different amounts of delay.
In addition to the problems associated with latencies, the plain old telephones are relatively ‘dumb’ devices compared with recent telephony technologies. While the plain old telephones can generate and transmit tones, each tone corresponding to a particular digit pressed by a user, a POT cannot transmit information such as the time of a key press and the duration of the key press.
With the advancement of technology, multiplayer games are made possible over communication networks such as Internet, mobile telecommunications networks etc. Current multiplayer games require the use of specialized gaming consoles and controllers which are technologically more advanced than the simple POT. Video games, for example, have specialized controllers depending on the games and may be wired or wireless in data communication with their gaming console. Some music-based multiplayer games such as ‘Guitar Hero’ or ‘Rock Band’ may have specialized controllers shaped in the form of guitar, drums, microphones, etc., for enhanced game play.
However, video game developers generally design with the intelligent controllers in mind. Although these intelligent controllers do not have problem associated with latencies or delays described above because they may send timing information such as timestamp as a parameter to the game server and may adequately synchronize video playback, video game developers typically market the gaming systems (i.e. computers, game consoles, controllers, software etc.) as a video game package, with a relatively premium price attached to the package. In emerging markets, this represents high cost where a great majority of people may not be able to afford such specialized controllers.
There is at present no interactive, broadcast game for multiple players on multi-platforms wherein the broadcast game is able to accept inputs from different types of controllers.
In addition to the above, there is also at present no Interactive, broadcast game for multiple players on multi-platforms which permit synchronization across different controllers and communication networks.
The present invention seeks to alleviate or reduce the above mentioned drawbacks.